AI chatbots are everywhere. They’re a good solution to get answers about any topic quickly, making information retrieval and reasoning accessible and intuitive to use. But not all chatbots are created the same. With different models and feature sets, some can push your work forward—and others can bring it down to a halt.
Microsoft unified all of its chatbots under the Copilot brand. You can access this experience in Microsoft Edge or, if you subscribe to the paid plan, across all your Microsoft 365 apps. You’ll have a side-tab chat in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel with an OpenAI model that interacts with your documents, answers questions, and runs simple actions.
We’ll compare this approach with Personal AI: a platform where you can create a range of AI personas to assist you on your business topics via chat, securely trained with your data. Let’s dive in.
Beyond these big-picture differences, here’s how each app compares based on their features:
In Personal AI, you can mention your AI personas in chat channels, using their outputs as context for other users and personas inf the channel.
Personal AI is more than a general-purpose chat experience. You can train multiple personas within your account, which will customize what each of them will know. These personas can be experts in a single project in your company, a copilot for your financial team, or even be trained to be an AI employee who knows everything about a topic, workflow, client, or industry.
Thanks to its MODEL-3 model, Personal AI is a good match to train specialized assistants who can accurately and consistently answer questions about your business data. Instead of hallucinating or providing general information, the model retrieves memories created during training to provide a context-aware answer.
While all memories are collected in a single AI brain, you can create AI personas that act as a virtual workforce. You can train them to know everything about marketing, law cases, or patients in your practice—with stringent data privacy and security compliance, including SOC II and HIPAA.
You and your team can interact with these specialized personas on a 1-on-1 basis or via a chat channel with multiple participants. In the latter case, when you mention an AI persona, it will respond to your prompt in the channel, adding it to the conversation context.
But these personas can even collaborate with each other. If you mention multiple personas during a group chat, each will use the previous outputs to build strategy documents, create documents, or answer questions, depending on your instructions.
If you’re struggling with general answers that don’t understand your business, Personal AI is the best tool to keep outputs close to your data.
Microsoft Word with the Copilot tab open on the right side, assisting writing workflows.
In simple terms, Microsoft Copilot is ChatGPT integrated with Microsoft products. While it’s available through a side tab in Microsoft Edge for free and on the web app, it becomes more useful when you subscribe to the paid Copilot Pro plan.
This unlocks a side tab inside every Microsoft 365 app, where you can chat with Copilot to ask questions about the current document, generate new content, and ask to perform simple actions on your documents.
These simple actions aren’t very powerful, as Copilot doesn’t have deep control over the underlying processes of each app, but they can give a small speed boost when you’re brainstorming a few changes to a Word draft or a PowerPoint presentation.
The kind of answers that you’ll get are based on the training data of the model that powers Copilot. At the time of writing, this is OpenAI’s GPT-4o, known for its balanced creativity, reasoning, and factual knowledge.
Still, beyond the data available on the document you have open, it doesn’t know anything else about you and your business. This lack of context can make the model assume information, generate hallucinations, or provide inaccurate advice.
In Personal AI, the process of uploading new files and managing your memory is simple, available in easy-to-use apps.
Training an AI model is something that only machine learning experts can do. However, with Personal AI, you can train your AI model without ever having to write a single line of code.
How does this work? First, create your AI personas, the virtual co-workers that will extend your workforce. You can choose a name, communication style, and add custom instructions on how they should structure replies.
Once you gather all business documents, you can upload them onto the platform, organized into your personas by topics. Your AI will process them, creating memories from each file, and storing them in the memory layer. The training process takes less than a minute and you can test the results right away.
When you ask questions to your AI, you can see how much it knows about this topic by inspecting the personal score. This is created for every message your AI generates, helpful for understanding if your model needs more information about this topic.
If you upload inaccurate information, you can search for the faulty memory and then edit or delete the related document. But you don’t have to do this every time information changes: your AI is aware of the passage of time. It can understand how topics evolve, prioritizing memories created recently. This also allows for asking about how a certain project has evolved over time.
To put the training process on autopilot, you can activate memory sync with Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Outlook and Gmail. This will automatically import new files and emails into your AI, keeping it up to date with the latest progress in your company.
These characteristics are what make Personal AI a platform that’s powerful and easy to use, eliminating the complexity of training and customizing an AI model.
Customizing Microsoft Copilot is only possible via Microsoft Copilot Studio, a separate low-code chatbot builder platform.
When you subscribe to Microsoft Copilot Pro, you only get access to the AI chatbot integration into your other Microsoft 365 apps. There was a way to customize the Copilot experience with Copilot GPTs—the equivalent to ChatGPT’s GPTs—but this feature was retired in July 2024.
Customizing Copilot is now only possible in Microsoft Copilot Studio. It brands itself as a low-complexity platform to customize the chatbot with your data, so you can deploy it to the Microsoft 365 chat side tabs.
But the reality is different: the experience is low-code, with a complicated data integration process that involves familiarity with other Microsoft products, such as Power Platform, Power Automate, and Graph.
Even when integrating your business data with Copilot Studio, the accuracy won’t be as high as it can be in Personal AI. This is because Copilot Studio uses a basic RAG framework that stores representations of your documents in a vector database, and then retrieves that context when you send a request to the model. Beyond this technical characteristic, it also lacks time awareness: it can’t provide answers on the evolution of topics, forcing you to delete outdated information and upload updates.
Personal AI is more powerful in this aspect: MODEL-3, its proprietary model, has a dedicated memory layer that stores your data. This is not an external vector database as in Copilot Studio: your memories are embedded in the model, providing much higher accuracy during the generation process. We’ll talk more at length about how this works later in this article.
Personal AI’s MODEL-3 includes a memory layer. Every new document or file that you upload to the platform is broken down into single memories and stored. This is different from a standard RAG framework because your memories are part of the model, not stored in an external vector database and retrieved when you ask a question.
When you’re asking questions to your AI model or any of your personas, the model has an advanced interpretation process: it understands your intent, retrieves all the memories connected to the topic, and starts generating the best answer with the retrieved content. The more memories available—and the more semantically relevant they are—the higher will be the personal score for the response.
Your model is like a savings account for your business data. The more files you upload, the more value your AI personas can provide, offering time-aware features that can help you understand how initiatives, projects, and even financials progressed over time. This big-picture understanding can help you understand what’s the next best decision for your company, empowering human intuition and reasoning with AI’s big data processing and recall capabilities.
Microsoft Copilot for the web was released shortly after ChatGPT, powered by the same AI model, thanks to the partnership with OpenAI. The first iteration was rife with gaslighting stories, where the chatbot ended conversations abruptly and accused the user of deceit. While those stories are now amusing memories, the Microsoft Copilot product is not in the clear yet.
Users review it as being underwhelming, overhyped, and less capable than advertised. Many wonder whether other alternatives are better, considering the relatively limited feature set. It faces performance issues when handling simple formatting tasks in Word and offers ineffective data connections with other software.
Beyond these reviews, Microsoft Copilot Studio had a security vulnerability where an attacker could access sensitive information. This has been fixed but is another dent in the product’s track record.
While Microsoft Copilot can work in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, you can only leverage its wide feature set separately. Personal AI brings all these capabilities into a single experience: you can upload text files, images, tabular data, and presentations to train your AI.
When it’s time to generate answers, your AI will draw on these data types and display them in the response. It will even be able to reason based on uploaded Excel spreadsheets, giving you accurate financial breakdowns or user growth statistics.
Microsoft Copilot delivers a seamless, integrated AI experience across Microsoft 365, powered by OpenAI’s models. It’s designed to provide quick, context-based assistance directly within your documents, making it ideal for users deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem. However, its customization is limited by a document-centric approach and a cumbersome low-code process that can introduce security and integration challenges.
In contrast, Personal AI offers a more intuitive, powerful solution. Its proprietary MODEL-3 comes with an embedded memory layer that allows you to train AI personas with comprehensive company data—from text and images to spreadsheets—yielding highly accurate and context-aware responses. For those who need robust data handling, continuous learning, and easy, no-code customization, Personal AI stands out as the superior choice.
Ultimately, if seamless integration within a familiar ecosystem is your priority, Microsoft Copilot may suit your needs. But for those seeking a flexible, highly capable AI that evolves with your data, Personal AI is the clear winner.
